It’s been a busy year, and right now at the end of it is the very most busy, on a copy-editing project for Exalted Funeral. I love and appreciate everyone who reads, comments, and supports my writing. Games I’m Running I’m still running Aurikesh, which has just celebrated eleven years. I […]
It has been more than two years since my last post in this series, in part because we spent two years not LARPing. We’re back at it now, and that makes it easier to write. In the first two posts, I talked about ten field battle models I’ve seen. Today’s […]
The post from a few weeks ago about new healing spells for D&D sparked a conversation about new healing approaches for LARPing. In this case, I’m mostly interested in the hit-location based LARPs that I’m playing – hit point games are fine if that’s your thing, but I’m not the […]
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked LARP design. Quarantine has of course put games on hold for the last year, though as vaccines roll out, we might be stirring again from that long slumber. Anyway, in this post I’m talking about field battle models and implementation guidance for […]
Oh, wow, I haven’t written about LARP design since December, how about that! Anyway, even before that when I talked about active locations in boffer LARPs, I knew I wanted to talk about how to design good wandering monsters for LARPs. Creature narrative, costuming, powers, and deployment are major elements […]
“Instigator” may not appear in the seminal Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, but it has been recognized as a significant player type for a long time all the same. Today I want to talk about how GMs, and especially LARP game runners, can engage this kind of player, and a […]
This post comes out of countless conversations with Kainenchen about Flight Rising and other, similar games with active economies. I’ve written about trying to build functional game economies for LARPs before, and though that post is somewhat dated now, it’s still a foundation for this one. The point of this […]
I’m now completing six years of writing this blog. This year is on track to equal or very slightly surpass last year’s post total, even with the weekly column I’ve been writing for Tribality. This has been a momentous year for me in gaming and writing: I’ve gotten fairly steady freelance […]
Yeah, it felt about like this. The LARP that I play, Eclipse, recently staged an event that genuinely surprised me and did things I had never before seen in the whole medium of boffer LARPing. I had a phenomenal time, and I want to break down what they did and […]
By request from a reader, I’m talking today about Circle Tests in LARPs. These are far from universal in live-action games or any other kind of game, and I am far from an authority on all of the best practices around them. To my knowledge, the term comes from Shattered […]
